ietf-nntp Is there going to be an NNTP standard?

Charles Lindsey chl at clw.cs.man.ac.uk
Tue May 5 02:31:43 PDT 1998


In <Pine.OSF.3.96.980504101130.16852A-100000 at worf.netins.net> Jonathan Grobe <grobe at worf.netins.net> writes:

>          12.4 NEWNEWS

>            The optional parameter "distributions" is a list of
>            distribution groups, enclosed in angle brackets.  If
>            specified, the distribution portion of an article's header
>            will be examined for a match with the distribution categories
>            listed, and only those articles which have a distribution in
>            the list will be listed.  If more than one distribution is to
>            be supplied, they must be separated by commas within the angle
>            brackets.

>Sorry, but I cannot tell from this language in the draft if this refers to
>Distribution header or part of group name (hierarchy...). Is this clear
>to everyone else?

>And note that while The Distribution header is mostly broken currently,
>apparently there is significant interest in the RFC1036 revision group
>to make it useful again (Brad Templeton is a strong advocate of this
>view).

The Distribution header in 1036bis is clearly defined. Distributions are
case-insensitive, are composed strictly of ASCII-only letters together
with "+", "-" and "_" (but not in the first position) and can be invented
by anyone wanting to carve out a space within Usenet. However, the
top-level country names (US, UK etc) are automatically recognised as
distributions, but not EDU, COM, etc, and certainly not hierarchies such
as COMP, NET, etc (though they might be "invented" by someone for some
purpose). So your text above looks OK if by "distributions" you mean
things in the Distribution header, and the removal of the suggestion in
RFC977 that hierarchies might be distributions is to be welcomed.

There is one change from 1036 that you should take heed of, however, and
that is the possibility of negative-distributions, allowing you to write:

	Distribution: world, !us

I guess this means you need to allow "!" in the appropriate place in the
syntax of the NEWNEWS command (note that "!" is not currently a feature of
Wildmat).

I also suggested, in an earlier message to this list, that you needed to
allow "!" in the groups part of the NEWNEWS command. Did anything come of
this? (I was not subscribed to the list at that time because of some
machinations of my upstream postmaster, so I may have missed any replies).

-- 
Charles H. Lindsey ---------At Home, doing my own thing------------------------
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